ggw@cs.duke.edu (Gregory G. Woodbury) (07/18/89)
Research Triangle Area of North Carolina is the area around the cities of Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh. Durham is served by GTE-South, Raleigh and Chapel Hill are Southern Bell. Research Triangle Park is in the GTE domain (Durham County). Enough geography. Generally, GTE provides Durham with flat rate service that includes: Durham, RTP, Butner and Creedmore, GTE provides RTP with Business service (flat rate, mostly) that includes: Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. SBT provides Raleigh flat rate service to: Raleigh (and suburbs to west, south and north - east is Durham), and RTP. Chapel Hill gets Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Given this, lots of businesses like RTP exchange services, but FTX is not available due to the strange politics of the RTP. (They have to be in the RTP or certain specific areas near it to qualify.) Many businesses in Chapel Hill (about 20 miles from Durham, 32 from Raleigh) got FTX lines from Durham (note past tense). There have been calls (for many years) to extend "local area" service between Durham and Chapel Hill, but this was prevented by the PUC's unwillingness to force GTE and SBT into bed together. Finally, they did make a "Tri-wide" calling plan available. It is basically just a measured rate service that lets consumers in each city call all the others. This, in effect, makes each calling area in the Triangle look like the descriptions I have seen of Boston. There is an unmeasured local area, and then there is a measured service extended area, and then there is "Long Distance" (there are the usual disctinctions about intra-LATA, and inter-LATA and the carrier wars). Tri-wide also changed is so that you don't need 1+ to call in the extended calling areas. When Tri-wide was announced, it was very poorly handled, most people in Durham got it by default (you had an option to refuse it, but they did NOT make this very well known). Chapel Hill and Raleigh implemented it about a month later and the users had to request it. Also, Raleigh and Chapel Hill (SBT) users can get more extensions to other areas (e.g. Chapel Hill-Hillsboro, or Raleigh-Smithfield) at additional cost. The Duke University TelCom system (independent of GTE and SBT) chose to not participate, thus there is still 1+ service from Duke to Raleigh or Chapel Hill. Greg Woodbury